One suspects that game developers sometimes come up with titles first and fill in the details later.Knights of the Round Cable is brimming with fire-breathing dragons and gallant, tin-plated heroes who - quite possibly in service to a pun rather than logic - love nothing more than a bit of a twirl.

Start a game and you're presented with a castle courtyard, inexplicably crammed full of mysterious, floating pegs. A simple tap of a button causes your perpetually ricocheting knight to tether onto the nearest one and continue to orbit until you let go.

Swing it to win it

As each stage progresses, rings of coloured gems appear around each peg and you're tasked with using your spinning prowess to gather as many as possible. Gems add points to your final score, and if you manage to gather all gems in a single-colour cluster three times in a row your mediaeval rotator enters Fiesta mode, racking up even bigger points.

After a certain amount of time, you're whisked away to the next stage, where enemies grow yet more eager to whittle away your life meter.

Gem layouts become more exotic, too, and you'll need to perfect your angle of approach and exit trajectory to expertly sweep through their curving, twisting lines.

It's here that the game's limited appeal lies, as you strive for highscore supremacy through mastery of the its quite literally loopy physics.

A bit of a drag(on)

That said, there's no escaping the unwavering simplicity of the game's core mechanics - and even a familiar mini-objective system struggles to flesh out Knights's monotonous structure.

Bonus coins are awarded for every three challenges completed, and these in turn let you unlock new characters and abilities. Sadly, most are virtual prerequisites if you seriously hope to climb those leaderboards - and that probably means you'll need to dip into your pocket for an even remotely fair crack at the game.

Even more problematic is the game's inability to create a genuine sense of peril. There's no compulsive risk-reward trade-off to push it into the kind of super-addictive territory that makes similarly structured games like Temple Run work.